domestic bill of rights

In order to be free to live as I see fit, I hereby declare that I have the following rights:

• I can clean anything anytime I want to.
• I can organize any space I want to.

And so do you!

haiku philosophy

Haiku are for physically busy people who have spaces to experience nature and reflect on it.

navigating by heart

Do I have anything to say that's worth hearing? What specifically can I transmit that someone would want to hear?

Smells like depression.

I'm at the point where I drive myself to avoid the emptiness of hanging out with myself – just like everyone I know who is running hard from depression.

I remember savoring moments, stealing them, rejoicing in the magic of being alive and being uniquely myself.

How do I find myself back there from here?

the moon outside time

I can record my thoughts for anyone who might read them. I don't have to have a designated audience.

How much of what I have read has been just that: a howl across space and time with no idea who or when is on the other side.

boredom is the mother of creation

When you are bored, CREATE, don't consume.

Let the fertile void within you open to the cosmos so you can give birth to something beautiful and new.

kimchi family tree

In an ambitious mood right before a road trip, I purchased vegetables for the next round of kimchi.

I’d decided to branch out, so I bought a tremendous amount of daikon, mei choy, leeks, and carrots. I also found some bird’s eye chilis and a precious jar of genuine wasabi powder.

(Items labeled ”wasabi” are often plain old horseradish colored green and mixed with hot mustard. I had originally planned on using fresh horseradish as the wasabi component of my kimchi, but there was no fresh horseradish, so I was delighted to find genuine wasabi.)

I ran low on time before the road trip. I was in a quandary. The vegetables would be worse for wear after a week in the fridge. During the early stages of fermentation, vegetables require a lot of care. If I jarred them up and left them for a week, they might bubble up, and overflow the brine, leaving the top vegetables dry and susceptible to mold. I needed to start the vegetables in a big container and include enough brine to protect them no matter how vigorously they fermented.

The day before I left, I set the vegetables up to self-brine in a 2-gallon mixing bowl. I sliced the vegetables and mixed them with salt to draw water out of the vegetables and make the brine. I stirred them every few hours to disperse the salt evenly. That evening, I added leftover brine from an earlier batch of kimchi and stirred some more.

Right before I left town, I put a plate on the veggies to weigh them down and topped with a generous quantity of salt water. Ordinarily, I try to self-brine as much as possible and keep the salt water to a minimum. In this case, I wanted to make sure that the vegetables would be okay on their own for a week. I covered the bowl and went on my trip.

I returned home to the smell of fermentation. I peeked in the bowl and saw nice bubbly brine without any signs of undesirable growth. I went to bed untroubled and slept the sleep of the just plain tired.

The next morning, I got out my half-gallon jars, canning funnel, pickle weights, and air gaps. I went to work.

I sliced a couple apples and a big ginger root and layered them in the first jar with the fermenting vegetables.

The second jar got spoonfuls of vegetables interspersed with handfuls of bird’s eye peppers (about half an ounce of dried peppers).

The third jar got lots of vegetables and occasional careful sprinkling (less than a teaspoon total) of wasabi powder.

I had only a hazy idea of proper quantities of any of these seasonings.

I’m excited to see what happens.

the teapot lid scandal

Blearily, I boiled a kettle and set about making tea. 

The lid of the teapot sat, wrong side-up on the counter, broken along the lines of a six-pointed star. Right in the middle was the round button handle of the lid, right-side up. It looked like a strange pottery flower that someone had deliberately created and left as a message to me.

It also looked like it had fallen gently and broken during normal use and been left there so I would know it was broken and not waste time looking for it.

I decided to make myself a cup instead while I pondered the mystery of the broken teapot lid.

My husband denied everything and prophesied that no one else would admit to knowing how the lid broke, either. Other potential informants were still sleeping. I was tempted to awaken them, but did not.

I threw the broken lid away. 

We've broken tea crockery before. I knew that you can't buy a replacement lid for this teapot. I had made a mental note to save the lids of any broken teapots. I couldn't recall whether I had ever actually done so, and, if I had, where I had put them.

The teapot was somewhat worse for wear and tear. It had lost the edge of its inner rim, but the damage was stable, and it still worked perfectly fine. I could buy a whole new teapot, but I didn't want to.

I rummaged through likely corners, finding a white lid from a slightly smaller teapot. The fit was precarious, particularly with the broken rim of the teapot. Digging deeply through the top shelf of another cabinet, I found a teapot lid the exact size and color of the one that had broken.

My husband watched my victorious hunt while he spread peanut butter and raspberry jam on his morning toast. We chatted all the while, and he returned to his man-cave, toast in hand.

My sleeping son stirred, and I moved to the side of his bed to see if he would awaken. As soon as he opened one of his eyes, I spoke.

“Do you have a story about how the teapot lid came to be sitting broken on the counter like a perfect flower?”

“Yes.” 

That one word told me the rest of the story.

“It almost looked like it was sitting there and just decided to break. All the pieces were right there, so it must not have been much of a shock or there would be pottery shards all over the kitchen.

“How about I make some tea?”

more reinvention

I had some leftover white chicken meat I was going to put on a salad. The chicken was a little dry, so I wanted to marinade it in some kind of dressing for a few hours before making the salad.

My husband had bought a new kind of salsa, which turned out to be blah and uninspired. I decided to use it as the basis for my dressing. I mixed in some coconut yogurt for its creaminess, and a few other things until the dressing was smooth and tangy.

While eating the salad, I realized that I had reinvented French dressing.

I don't like French dressing.

sam what am

toxic caterpillars
feathery clouds drift
against the sky

unsettled weather
the stellars jays scout
nesting sites

empty teacup
a crow tries to chase
a seagull

play it again

write what's real
expectations drain
into the earth

summer salt
the junco flicks
her white tail

abandoned projects
the tsk tsk tsk of insects
in the maple

and rolling

housework
oh give me space
to breathe

evening light
an old pickup growls
its way home

stretch my wings
head for the mountain
over yonder

haiku keep on rolling

A little loose on the seasonal references and juxtaposition, perhaps, but at least they have kireji.

give the girl
some paper
her tea goes cold

same old view
every single day
fresh breezes

morning prayer
inspiration
move me brightly

when life gives you rainbows

Share them.

The second one shows the double rainbow more clearly.

While this one reveals a portal to a magical world.

don't go breaking my top

Santa Claus brought me a Whirl-o top: 

It has an LED that lights up when it spins. 

It has a tin gizmo that you flick with your wrist to get the top spinning. 

It launches itself from this gizmo when it gets going fast enough. 

Until today, the LED lit when the top got spinning and went off when the top slowed down. 

After a spectacular launch earlier today, 

the LED started lighting when the top was stationary and turning off when it got moving. 

The top glowed on the kitchen table for a few hours. 

Soooo, after trying to fix it by launching it a couple score times, 

I decided I would have to put on my big engineer glasses and 

take it apart. 

After locating it online so I could show y'all, 

I noticed an 800 number on their website. 

I decided to call and ask, 

expecting to get a bored order fulfillment clerk who would think I was a Class A Idiot 

for thinking they might care to help me fix a $10 toy. 

Instead, I got an excited person who was quite interested in what had gone wrong. 

He explained it to me in some detail and told me 

what I needed to do to get the top functioning again. 

The second hardest part was finding a tiny Philips head screwdriver 

(which appears to have gone missing from my eyeglass repair kit.

 I decided to go ahead and use a tiny flat head screwdriver. 

Don't faint.) 

I got the three tiny screws out. 

After some fiddling and a few test drives 

(cleverly NOT putting the screws back in until I had verified the fix), 

I found the middle spot where the guy had told me the tiny spring fitted. 

The top then returned to its customary behavior. 

Then came the hard part, 

which was getting the screws back in properly. 

This top has always worked amazingly well 

(the all-tin ones spin longer, but the LED model is way cooler). 

It has had hard daily use from most of the members of my family, 

who are a little jealous that I got the coolest toy for Christmas this year. 

I can now say that they have wonderful tech support. 

The Retro Space Blaster is coming out soon, 

and will certainly be on my wishlist to Santa this year. 

ta da!

A few weeks ago, I was looking to update my celery spread.

I'd been spreading plain tahini on celery, but I wanted something that spread more easily. I also wanted a little saltiness.

I mixed the tahini with a little lemon juice to brighten it, and thinned it with a little water to make it a nice, spreadable consistency.  I added salt bit by bit, tasting as I went. I added more lemon juice, more water, more salt and stirred and stirred.

When my new spread was pretty tasty, I thought I could do a lot with this basic sauce. I could spice it up. I could add parsley and olives. I could cut the salt, thin it, sweeten it a bit, and serve it over fruit.

I was really proud of my invention.

Right up until the moment I realized that I had just painstakingly reinvented hummus.

warning: may cause clipping

The Overton window is outside the bounds of the Overton window. It's a rhetorical device masquerading as political theory. It attempts to put bounds around the acceptability of political discourse. You can try to move or stretch the window if you don't like where it is, or try to figure out where it is and meekly stay within it. If you're in politics, you'd like to control it, keep your opponents within it, and move it in your direction.

The idea and expression of where the Overton window is seems to sharply depart from what Actual People (tm) think and say about the issues. As a box, it's far too small to be useful.

Let's deprecate it and move on to more fluid ways of thinking about public discourse.

swinging your fist

You don't have the right to:

• Take another person's life.
• Shoot a human being.
• Hurt anyone.
• Assault someone.
• Coerce anyone.
• Touch another person without their permission.
• Harass anyone.
• Bully another person.
• Threaten a human being with bodily harm.
• Interfere with someone else's bodily integrity or self-determination.

If you do any of these things, you are not exercising your rights. You are violating the rights of another human being.

alarm buzzer

alarm buzzer
finally you can
go back to sleep

how parenting is like management

You're responsible for everyone and everything.

You know that one person can't do it all herself, so you form support networks and delegate responsibilities to the kids.

You know that a well-organized, well-cared-for crew is both more pleasant and more effective, so you plan ahead to keep things running smoothly.

You're a master of logistics. You can organize a tricky release schedule or a 3-week camping trip for 10. You have a clear sense of the effort required to pull off a venture, and you can scale preparations to both the task and resources available.

You're flexible and think quickly on your feet. Life tosses you a lot of curve balls, and you have the grace and the experience to hit the sweet spot when it does.

You've honed your set of priorities so that you spend your energy on tasks that are worth the effort. You have a good sense of when an  emergent issue needs immediate attention and when it will distract and dissipate energy from more important goals. 

You remain calm and centered even in difficult circumstances.

You know that people aren't difficult on purpose just to annoy you. They are difficult because they need something they're not getting. You have the understanding to cut through the crap to get to the essential issue and the tact to solve the problem so that people feel good about the solution.

was that so hard?

dated 20 July 2017, 2 weeks after breaking that cuboid bone

I'm sitting in the ice asana, with my broken foot semi-propped on two pillows and the other leg arching around the edge of the pillows.

It's a posture that has become second nature in the past two days. Since my misadventure with the garden step, I've spent a lot of time in this chair, ice-pack-wrapped foot hoisted high. 

It's ridiculous, and I often think that I should just take up my bed and walk. My left foot soon clues me in that I can't just walk away from this problem. One minute, I was an ordinary able-bodied human, and the next I was splayed on the concrete with a broken foot.

"It's not bad," the doctor told me when he'd seen the x-rays, "just a bad sprain and an avulsion fracture."

I believed him. Not bad meant that it didn't need surgery or to be casted. A boot and crutches for 6-8 weeks would do the trick.

Yeah, but, not able to walk or carry much of anything for a couple months? The past few days have stretched into eons. So many things I do require two good feet. I never knew how many before I had a foot that couldn't bear weight at all.

Every small task is a challenge requiring careful planning. There's something strangely good about this; it focuses the attention on the present moment.

I was not doing a good job of focusing on the moment or on my body, and so I broke my foot. The broken foot forces me to focus on my body and its every move. A spiritual lesson delivered from foot to brain.

My foot is my teacher. It teaches about balance and vulnerability, synergy and interdependence. It teaches me to be graceful about my awkwardness and sanguine about my instability. It teaches me that ramps are long and crutches wide. It teaches me how to pull my pants up while balancing on my right foot. It teaches me how to ask for and accept help.